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Opinion of Stevens, J.
narrower record, it made no express ruling on the part of the Government's rehearing motion requesting to make the first-appearance and arraignment transcripts part of the appellate record. For that reason, even with the transcripts now in the parties' joint appendix filed with us, we should not resolve their bearing on Vonn's claim before the Court of Appeals has done so. Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Mineta, 534 U. S. 103 (2001).
We therefore vacate the Court of Appeals's judgment and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
Justice Stevens, concurring in part and dissenting in part.
For the reasons stated in Part III of the Court's opinion, I agree that the effect of a violation of Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure should be evaluated on the basis of the entire record, rather than just the record of the plea colloquy, and that a remand is therefore required. Contrary to the Court's analysis in Part II of its opinion, however, I am firmly convinced that the history, the text of Rule 11, and the special office of the Rule all support the conclusion, "urged by the Government" in McCarthy v. United States, 394 U. S. 459, 469 (1969), that the burden of demonstrating that a violation of that Rule is harmless is "place[d] upon the Government," ibid.
In McCarthy, after deciding that the trial judge had not complied with Rule 11, the Court had to "determine the effect of that noncompliance, an issue that ha[d] engendered a sharp difference . . . among the courts of appeals." Id., at 468. The two alternatives considered by those courts were the automatic reversal rule that we ultimately unanimously endorsed in McCarthy and the harmless-error rule urged by
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